Wild Geese Returning by Michele Metail

Author:Michele Metail
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2017-03-27T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 8.2 The Principle Female Role (Su Hui)

The British Museum holds a collection of books and paintings related to Su Hui, including one portrait, the whole of which belonged to Guan Daosheng. Let us also take note of the many wood engravings—illustrations of the works of Li Yu and Li Ruzhen, and the “Album of One Hundred Beauties” (Baimei tupu) in which the images later codified in this story are tirelessly reproduced.

Parallel to her celebrity status in literary circles, Su Hui became a legendary figure in the region of her birth, Shaanxi. This story takes a more tragic turn, no doubt imbued with the hardships endured by those who lived there. Upon receiving his wife’s poem, Dou Tao fled his exile in Dunhuang in order to rejoin her. When he arrived, she had hung herself and her body had disappeared. According to the legend, the emperor, who lived a life of debauchery, knew of Su Hui’s poem and admired it. So he sent a eunuch bearing a decree announcing that Dou Tao had died in the imperial marches and that he was inviting Su Hui to join him at his palace because he wanted to make her his concubine. Indignant, Su Hui cut off her beautiful hair and committed suicide to escape that dishonor. Inconsolable, Dou Tao supposedly had her poem engraved on a black stone slab and mounted on the wall screening the north entrance of their home in the village of Gumeiyang.

Since this story has been endlessly embroidered, another version holds that the prefect Dou Tao had disobeyed an order from the emperor and was exiled in the wilderness and all his possessions were confiscated. Su Hui remained with her mother and daughter. Their life became increasingly difficult. So the young wife wove handkerchiefs in threads of many colors with reversible poems on them. Underneath she embroidered the words, “The sparrows of the field enliven the spring, a pair of cranes open their wings,” imploring the emperor for clemency. For years she sold them on the streets to survive. One handkerchief reached the court, at Chang’an. The story moved the ministers, and the emperor finally got word of it. Amazed by the exceptional talents of this young woman, he immediately had Dou Tao called back. Dou Tao rejoined his wife and the couple lived happily ever after. The text inscribed on those handkerchiefs has come down to us. The one hundred and twelve characters that it includes in fact generate only one reading. The “reversibility” inheres in the gestures that must be performed in order to read it, because the characters are inscribed in all directions, diagonally, backwards…which again recalls the methods of secret writing widely used in Taoist circles.

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